The primary contents of women’s fashion magazines are fashion, beauty and
health. This paper sets out to explore the ways in which international fashion
magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Marie Claire portray feminine beauty in
textual and advertising matter and how their readers react to such portrayals.
Beauty is analysed as grooming practice, and make-up as the prime symbol of
the self and its many facets in social interaction. The paper looks at the different
kinds of ‘face’ that magazines invite their women readers to put on and
suggests that they – and their advertisers – adopt a ‘technology of enchantment’
as a means of exercise control over them. Magazine and advertising language is
imbued with ‘magical’ power, and the paper shows how the structure of
advertisements closely parallels that of magical spells used in certain healing
rituals. It concludes by using magazine reader interviews to learn the extent to
which women do or do not believe in such ‘spells’ and whether they are
encouraged to buy into the ‘beauty myth’.